We often find niggles with social media platform processes that aren’t quite efficient enough, or wish certain features existed. It now seems customary that most platforms will roll out new features or sunset old tools every summer, so we’ve rounded up a few interesting updates from the last few weeks to help highlight a little of what’s new on social.
Facebook has made moves to help creators reach a wider audience. Their new podcast feature will provide users with more ways to promote their content by directly connecting their audio recordings back to their Facebook audience for listening in-stream. The update will also allow viewers to ‘listen to every episode directly on Facebook’.
This will become an option on a select number of business Facebook pages next to the standard ‘About’ and ‘Photos’ tab as an experiment pending a wider rollout.
Facebook announced these plans in April, stating at the time, “Within the next few months, you’ll be able to listen to podcasts directly on the Facebook app – both while using the app or when the app is backgrounded. And because it’s still hard to discover podcasts you like, we will help you easily find new podcasts and episodes based on your interests, comment on them and recommend them to your friends.”
This is a feature that will come in handy for many businesses who output audio as part of their marketing. We previously ran a piece about the power of podcasts in marketing on our blog and so if this is an avenue you’re considering, why not take a read?
Twitter is adding a new ‘Subscribe’ button that will be made available to subscribers of the Twitter-owned Revue platform to help the social media giant develop their platform to respond more to its audience’s growing needs. And let’s face it, Twitter needs to step up to stay relevant – though a lot of their new features are more about catching up rather than stepping up!
The new button will prominently feature at the top of a user’s profile advertising their newsletter, encouraging the user’s audience to subscribe in a ‘one click’ process (well… a few more clicks than just one, but it’s a frictionless experience).
This new feature aligns well with another recent profile experiment dubbed “Twitter Professional Profiles”. Your Twitter Business profile will be able to display ‘Get Directions’ and ‘Contact buttons along with other key details in the style of Google My Business accounts or Facebook business pages. This feature has apparently been rolled out to a small number of accounts in the US and so we’re looking forward to this feature hitting our shores.
dir=”ltr”>They’re getting closer… https://t.co/gC5PaQFAgz
— Social Media Today (@socialmedia2day) July 18, 2021
If you’re looking to get a better understanding of how to reach your audience, a new Instagram algorithm overview was announced as part of Instagram’s Creator Week event last month that sheds light on how posts get ranked, influencing how and where they appear.
Instagram explained, “We want to do a better job of explaining how Instagram works. There are a lot of misconceptions out there, and we recognize that we can do more to help people understand what we do. Today, we’re sharing the first in a series of posts that will shed more light on how Instagram’s technology works and how it impacts the experiences that people have across the app.”
In conclusion, business can look forward to some handy new features on social media, with a little while to wait yet in the UK for a rollout to occur. As time goes on, we’re sure there will be plenty more clever updates in the works.
We hope that you found this article useful. Take a look at the other social media help articles we’ve put together:
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